Behind the Elastic Stack: Working with eBay

At Elastic{ON}16, Support Engineer Joshua Rich got to meet one of the customers that he has been working with in-person for the first time: Sudeep Kumar from eBay. Here, he shares what it's like to work on the support team at Elastic, where the support engineers are dedicated to specific accounts, and get intimately familiar with the people and projects they're supporting.

"I know that platform. They're my customer. That's the way we work at Elastic."

At Elastic, we like to build a relationship with our customers. We are assigned to a support contact as opposed to being in a rotation, so we often feel like an extension of the customer's team. We build relationships in that team just like at any workplace and the information exchange flows both ways.

One of the first customers I started working with when I joined Elastic is eBay. I've built up a knowledge of their project and use case just as Sudeep and the eBay team's knowledge of the Elastic Stack has increased. We're definitely past the general questions and issues — now we can focus on solving the fun problems!

I have been involved with Sudeep and his team since they first became a support customer. However, although we've exchanged a ton of support tickets and many conference calls, it wasn't until our Elastic{ON}16 event in February, some six months after I started working with Sudeep, that we were finally able to meet face-to-face. That was great to finally see each other, sit down, and just chat – talk shop and joke around a little. We also spent some time in front of the camera sharing what it's been like working together:

The best part about working with eBay is working at scale. They have a huge amount of data and a massive range of projects using the Elastic Stack. It's a deployment of a size that not many people get to work with. It's great to be able to contribute to their success. At the end of the day, it's really cool to think that I may have helped, even if just in a small way, to support something that millions of people all around the world are using.

"It feels less like working with colleagues and more like collaborating with friends on a project."

Working at Elastic has been a fantastic experience. Everyone across the board is so committed to everything we do and supporting the wider community around our products. It feels much less like working with colleagues to meet some business goals and much more like just a bunch of friends coordinating together on a fun project. The depth and width of knowledge within the company is amazing, and it's an environment in which you can both constantly learn and definitely contribute back.

Support is probably one of the most distributed teams within the company, so it's really important to us all that we have a sense of togetherness and team spirit. I think that is definitely the case and shines through strongly on those rare occasions where we are all standing in the same room. It's really great to be part of a passionate and fun team and it's always exciting to interact with our customers who continually surprise and inspire us with their use cases around our Elastic Stack.